Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I don't think Dostoevsky is going to make it into any elite list of novelists of mine. It's the moment when disbelief stops being suspended that a book loses its spell and after that it's not easy to get it back.

Just one flicker of doubt can do it. Just one moment when the text says 'so-and-so did this or that' and one thinks, 'no, they didn't, you just made that up'. It's by no means all over, of course, and I'm sure I'll see out Crime and Punishment to the end but I'm not in so much of a rush to buy up the rest of the complete works.

 

Reading one book while writing another can't be easy but Sebastian Faulks, for example, must do it to great effect given his output of novels and the performances he put in on The Write Stuff, the book quiz still repeated on R4Extra. One has two directions going on at once, at least - one that you're driving, the other in which you are a passenger, not to mention an awareness of any books of poems that are lying around to be looked at. I surprised myself by how readily a section on Paul Muldoon came together for C20th but maybe there's so much one could say and nobody can quite pin him down and so it's less obviously going to be found wrong than any false step one might make in writing about Larkin.

Next up on the turntable will be Yuja Wang's new Rachmaninov, being both a superstar new release and a one-ff way of filling a Rachmaninov-shaped gap on my shelves. There are bigger Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler-shaped holes in my library but there aren't any plans to fill them.

Ammunition in the armoury of my music-writing lexicon seemed to be looking thin before the local summer break in lunchtime concerts and I'm not sure how refreshed I'll find it as the season resumes this coming week. I might have to save it for special occasions, like the Menuhin Room events I'm gladly signed up to. Ideally, I'd like to find a new way of doing it but beyond describing what was played and finding something to say about how they played it, I'm not sure what else there is.